Ask yourself one question: Do you really believe in free markets?
Many people say yes, until they are asked to defend them, advocate for them, or vote for them. Free markets “don’t actually work,” we are told, they must be restrained, managed, corrected, and softened by government. What begins as professed support nearly always ends with a list of excuses as to why Americans should no longer support free markets.
Venezuelan-born political activist and PragerU personality Franklin Camargo, who has devoted his career to championing individual liberty and exposing the dangers of socialism, identified precisely this phenomenon during his speech at the Texas Youth Summit.
Listen to people talk about capitalism, even its supposed supporters, and they fixate on its flaws. Capitalism is acceptable, they say, only because it is better than the alternative. Yes, it has lifted humanity out of abject poverty, but it encourages selfishness and greed; it lacks noble intentions; and because of that government must step in to correct it.
Listen to those same people talk about socialism, and the standard suddenly changes. Socialism has beautiful intentions, they insist. If we lived in a perfect world, perhaps we would have it. It simply does not work in the one we inhabit.
Is that an argument for free markets — or for socialism?
SOCIALISM is not evil because it fails. It fails because it is EVIL. Here is why: https://t.co/qRC4aj4ZCw
— Franklin Andrés Camargo (@FranklinCamarg0) October 13, 2026
"You have probably heard something like this, well capitalism is not perfect, it's not really great, too much competition, money, we don't like that, but we need it," Camargo said. "Are you really defending capitalism? Or socialism looks nice in theory, it looks beautiful, it looks great, but it doesn't work. Are you really attacking socialism?"
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"Socialists have good intentions. Do they have good intentions? Do they have good intentions in North Korea? Do they have good intentions in Cuba? Do they have good intentions in Venezuela? Do they have good intentions in the Soviet Union, in Cambodia, in China, under Mao?" he asked. "No, they didn't have good intentions."
"We have spent decades rejecting socialism on economic grounds, but far too little time rejecting socialism on moral grounds. Socialism is an evil ideology because it rejects your right to live for your own sake," Camargo said. "Socialism is evil because it also rejects your right, your natural right, your God-given right to pursue your own happiness, to own property, to keep the fruits of your labor."
Socialism is not evil because it fails. It fails because it's evil, because it's an ideology that requires force from the government to make us equal in misery. Under socialism, your life belongs to the state, and we must reject that not only because it does not produce a high GDP or because it doesn't produce a lot of wealth or prosperity. We must reject that because socialism is, at its core, slavery. But we also need the courage to say capitalism is morally right because individual freedom is morally right and because that is the American way.
This is the message conservatives must hear, and must understand, if we are to defeat the Democrat Socialists of America.
Socialism has no merits. Free markets have every merit. They defend individual freedom. They check concentrated power, including the power of government. They let people decide for themselves what success looks like. They produce economic growth, abundance, lower prices, innovation, creativity, individual responsibility, and a better quality of life. Nearly everything good in our society has come from free markets, from millions of individuals cooperating, competing, innovating, and inadvertently making one another’s lives better. That is the genius of freedom.
It is time to defend free markets for their own sake, not as a reluctant compromise, but as the moral and practical foundation of a free society.
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